Tilting at Windmills

...An idea-in addition to its health care system-that we should borrow from Canada is the way it decides which civil servants to dismiss in a bureaucratic downsizing...

...Another problem was that many of the teachers were either marginal or just plain bad...

...He could be a great president...

...This would tell us much more than debates in which the questioning is done by reporters, who are often tempted to do a little posturing for the sake of their own careers, and whose questions only tell us what the reporters think is important when what we really need to know is what the candidates think is important...

...This has been especially true of election night coverage, which seems to go from tube to type almost automatically...

...Peter Jennings tried to use this approach in the March 5 candidates’ debate in Houston...

...F o m the It’s-Never-Too-EarlytoGet-Status-Anxiety Department: The headline over an advertisement for the Children’s Book-of-the-Month Club is “What Are Tomorrow’s Winners Reading Today?’ . . . The problem with Clinton’s draft history is not the letter he wrote-although the bit about maintaining his “political viability” did reek of the lifetime president-of-the-student-council mentality that is depressingly characteristic of so many of our leaders...

...What troubles me is that he didn’t choose an alternative form of service, as Paul Tsongas did with the Peace Corps...

...Oh, he’s at a Tsongas rally...

...Medicare payments to gastroenterologists are growing at a rate of 22 percent annually...

...I agree...

...My favorite: “The Sky Is Falling: Panicking the Client...

...w h y do hospitals insist on clothing you in ;hose mortifying gowns with the peekaboo opening in the back...

...This was asserted in the lead front-page story by Thomas B. Edsall and Dan Balz...

...It was a primary, not a caucus...

...Some of the operations are clearly needed...

...One has to suspect that in reaching out to the Republicans he has chosen to hide his heart...

...There was one little problem...

...What I fear most is that they will also forgive themselves...

...in black culture that exists throughout the country and is especially severe in Washington...

...Other “professions” have followed the lead of lawyers and doctors in requiring that their members participate in continuing education programs...

...One has to suspect that no one from the Post bothered to go see what was going on or even talk on the phone to those who were there...

...In connection with Joseph Blatchford’s memo soliciting lobbying business on page 24 of this issue, those of you who have computer access to magazine articles will want to call up Steven Waldman’s “The Real Price of Buying Influence” from the January 13 issue of Newsweek...

...This failure was to prove common among the educated and affluent elite of Clinton’s generation and those that followed...

...They should be thinking about how they will pay it instead of trying, as I think most of them are, to avoid acknowledging it to the world and even to themselves...

...The worktothe-rule spirit common in bureaucratic culture invites scorn from people who are struggling to lift a private enterprise out of the red...

...This period marked the end of an era that had begun in 1940 during which Americans of all classes felt an obligation to serve...

...Both are right, and we would all be better off if they each acknowledged the other guy’s good ideas...

...Written by an alumnus of this magazine, it is the most sophisticated explanation I have seen of the various hustles lobbyists employ to win, keep, and bilk their clients...

...But I am, as I suspect many others are, disturbed by their failure to acknowledge the similarity of their visions...

...In fact the bill was virtually dead...

...For most of this time, a democratic draft was in effect and it could not be evaded no matter how rich you were...

...In the few areas where opportunity has been wide open for a long time, e.g., sports and the performing arts, they have shown they can deliver...

...T h e Charleston Gazette reports that West Virginia University administrators are continuing to make more money despite higher education’s growing budget problems...

...peacekeeping forces...

...It has seemed to me and a lot of other District parents that most of the local teachers have been working to the rule for years...

...In California, the compensation received by the president of the University of California at San Diego has been raised to $307,900...

...A new medical instrument called an endoscope allows physicians to peer into a patient’s stomach and intestines and perform surgery without having to hospitalize him...

...There are and have been many silly aspects to the U.N., but its record as an international police force is mostly good and holds out hope for world sanity that we must not permit the Helmses to dash...

...So did John Kennedy and his three brothers...

...But the combined Tsongas-Clinton vote has usually constituted more than 50 percent of the total ballot count in the 1992 primaries...

...Canadian rules permit the retention of young workers with special skills...

...Black workers see this scorn as racial prejudice, which isn’t always the case (although it is part of the time, which complicates matters immeasurably...

...W ashington’s mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, ;ells how,-when she was growing up as part of the city’s black middle class, it was assumed that everyone would go to work for the government...

...Now the practice has even spread to families...

...Before I have to go to the hospital again, I hope there’s some crusader out there who will found a Society for the Promotion of the Overlapping Hospital Gown...

...What it does to the soul is illustrated by something Hillary Clinton said to a reporter last month: “For goodness sake,” she exclaimed, “you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks...

...But now I can report that The Washington Post is not a part of this trend...

...By the way, I inquired, where’s your dad...

...A few nights ago, I ran into the 23-year-old son of an old friend...

...Although I suspect he is a liberal at heart, he has had little to say about the abuse of the lower middle class and the poor by the Reagan-Bush administrations...

...For many years the civil service was one of the few respectable careers open to blacks...

...There were no conferences or meetings in Utah...

...Well, not exactly...

...His platform includes a national service program, which I admire...

...I also believe service should be performed because it is the right thing to do, not because it is rewarded with a bribe...

...S enator David Boren recently made a point about the culture of Congress that is worth pondering...

...I promise to serve as a press agent gratis...

...Of course, the scandal that makes outrages like these and the $4OO,OOO-plus salary given the recently resigned head of the United Way possible is the shamefully excessive salaries of American corporate executives...

...Speaking of work-to-the-rule, I had to laugh when the District of Columbia’s teachers’ union announced that its members could start that practice and continue until agreement on a new contract had been reached...

...Their last meeting was at the Greenbrier...

...The senators and representatives, after all, got where they are because they are skillful politicians adept at reaching accommodations with those whose votes they need, whether to get elected or get a bill passed...

...It was stated again in a story by the paper’s most prominent political correspondent, David Broder, that appeared on the first page of a special Campaign ’92 section...

...Her grandmother, she says, was always asking, “What’s your GS rating?’ and was not impressed at all by Kelly’s job with a local business...

...Among such groups is the Funeral Directors Association of West Virginia...

...The candidates themselves, some of whom threatened to walk out unless Jennings agreed to do at least some questioning...

...Along comes the pesky Greenberg with an Associated Press clip dated January 14, 1991, after Congress had authorized war and two days before we attacked, in which Clinton says, “I would agree with the arguments of the people in the minority on the resolution that we should give sanctions more time and maybe even explore a full embargo . . . before we go to war...

...But that excuse began a tradition of non-service that has lasted for 25 years...

...From that day on, print reporters have been relying heavily on television for the information they put into their stories...

...When my wife and I reached the painful decision to withdraw our son from the District’s public schools in 1975-a decision that was difficult because we believed in public education and because we were going to have a hard time paying for the alternative-one influential factor was that the teachers’ parking lot at our son’s school was empty by 3:30 almost every afternoon...

...It was that, because negotiations on the Hill are increasingly handled by staff members rather than by senators and congressmen themselves, the positions taken tend to be more rigid than would be the case if the principals were involved...

...This means they will forgive Clinton as they forgave Dan Quayle...

...I can’t believe the vulgar stupidity of those in Congress who are fighting appropriations for U.N...

...It fired Graef S. Crystal, the writer who had done the most to expose the CEO pay scam, because corporate big shots didn’t like having the public find out what they were up to...

...The subject of the taxdeductible course: How to sell more expensive caskets...

...Two thirds of the payments are for endoscopies...

...I once practiced law in a state capital and I can assure you that the big law firms made sure that their roster of partners always included enough lawyers who Actually, there is a vast amount were connected-and that potential clients knew they were connected...

...T h e transitional moment may have been the afternoon of November 22, 1963, when Tom Wicker of The New York Times and Douglas Kiker of the New York Herald-Tribune used a television set at the Dallas airport as the source of the stories they were writing about the Kennedy assassination...

...The idea is to frighten the client into thinking something terrible is going to be done by crazy congressmen or pointyheaded bureaucrats that will pose a grave threat to the client’s company or his entire industry...

...Working for a highpowered law firm is one such badge...

...I am delighted that they agree on so many causes close to my heart...

...This phenomenon is not confined to West Virginia...

...The latest revelation is that Clinton has been misrepresenting his position on the Gulf war by saying he supported it and criticizing Bob Kerrey for opposing it...

...The 19 top administrators, who made $1.18 million in 1986, will get $1.5 million this year...

...Guess who opposed it...

...Charles Peters...

...Neither favors the capital gains taxes advocated by Bush...

...But I don’t admire the fact that it offers a reward-a free college education-to those who serve...

...Over the years, I have heard many wonderful things about Hillary Clinton from mutual friends...

...Yet a recent review of teacher evaluations from 1988 to 1991 found that less than one half of 1 percent of D.C...

...of legal work-not to mention other career possibilities outside the law-that she could have pursued without having to represent a bank or sell her soul to rich clients or-and this is crucial-without having to lend her name to a firm that uses it to solicit business on the basis of the influence it implies...

...I think Clinton was right then, just as I think he was right to oppose the war in Vietnam...

...Speaking of neoliberalism, my main complaint about Tsongas is that he makes too much of the neo and too little of his liberalism...

...According to Michael Abramowitz, writing for The Washington Post’s excellent “Health” section, as a result of the new procedure gastroenterology has become the fastest growing medical specialty...

...Like the lawyers and the doctors, these undertakers have a keen sense of the kind of setting that is most conducive to advanced study...

...So few joined the Peace Corps that it shrank to 4,000 or 5,000 members during the seventies and eighties...

...What I hope he will do is contemplate the lives of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, two other men of reasonable talent who will not be remembered as great presidents for one reason-they lied too much...

...Individual voters went one by one to polling places and voted during the day...

...This should save money, shouldn’t it...

...But how many...

...Obviously, this does not mean that blacks are genetically indifferent to performance...

...My point is that just as the culture of the legal profession does not encourage devotion to high principle, the culture of bureaucracy does not encourage devotion to hard work...

...If there is anyone on whom Bill Clinton would like to put out a contract-maybe Gennifer Flowers knows a Sam Giancana-it’s probably Paul Greenberg, the editorial page editor of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Commercial, who keeps dredging up examples of the governor’s used-car salesman tendencies...

...indignant letter to the editor, let me hasten to add that I realize that there are some dedicated bureaucrats, black and white, just as there are some dedicated lawyers...

...The Clintons may symbolize the final triumph of the meritocratic class that Nicholas Lemann described in our JanuaryFebruary issue...

...The answer, for which I’m indebted to The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach, is because the flimsy gowns cost the hospital less than those that would cover your backside...

...As we approach the fall presidential debates, and even in the remaining primary debates, I hope more emphasis will be given to the Lincoln-Douglas format in which the contestants question one another and have time to rebut the answers...

...Elvis Presley served...

...The war in Vietnam gave the Bill Clintons a legitimate excuse not to serve in the military...

...The president of the United States, you may recall, is paid $200,000...

...Does she really think that the only alternative to the big law fm is “baking cookies...

...Unfortunately, there is no answer because, unlike the review to which prescription drugs are subjected before they are put on the market, there is no formal review of new technologies and procedures before they are used regularly in doctors’ offices...

...Whites would have similar problems if their main work experience had been in bureaucracies...

...What is so sad about all this is that I think Clinton has more raw ability than any of the other candidates, Democratic or Republican...

...The only other prestigious jobs were preaching in black churches and teaching at black colleges, which, like similar positions in white institutions, were not usually notable for exhausting work schedules...

...Not one word of what they said would suggest that she is stupid enough not to understand the subtle ways in which classy lawyers let a potential client know that they know the right people...

...What we need are more black leaders like Kelly who have worked in the private sector, who understand the problem, and who are able to talk to their fellow blacks about it without the complicating tinge of prejudice that can discredit similar efforts by whites...

...most of the people who will hold power in America in the next two decades came of age in this period...

...But again he has been less than candid about his record...

...It does seem a bit odd that this fact was unknown to either the Post’s high-powered political correspondents or to its vast assortment of highly paid editors...

...In this connection, have you heard about the spineless behavior of Financial World magazine...

...I asked him what he was doing...

...Have you noticed that neoliberalism has emerged as the majority doctrine of the Democratic Party...

...ours blindly protect older workers without regard to their ability and performance...

...teachers received conditional or unsatisfactory ratings during that period...

...Student fees at UCSD were, by the way, raised 40 percent this year...

...While CNN was telling us that Paul Tsongas won a primary in Utah on March 4, the Post declared he had won a caucus...

...Tsongas seeks cuts that will favor long-term investment, while Clinton wants to emphasize encouragement of new investment...

...The staff member, on the other hand, is worried about not exceeding his authority and being sure to protect his boss’ interest, and is seldom as intimately aware of where the “give” room is as the member himself...

...I believe higher education should be available to everyone on a long-term loan basis, payable as an addition to income tax...

...I should note that Clinton has at least not been paralyzed, as most of his peers have been, into letting his failure to serve keep him from asking others to do so...

...The candidates who previously came closest to being neoliberals, Gary Hart and Bruce Babbitt, failed to win a majority in any primary...

...Except for a handful who joined the Peace Corps or similar organizations, they left the serving to the lower middle class and working poor, the two groups that have supplied almost all of the military’s enlistees for the past two decades...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS Washington is full of businesses,especially law and public relations firms, that make sure they have someone working for every presidential candidate who has a chance of someday being in a position to do something for them...

...There is, however, one important corollary to Boren’s point: Since the staff member usually has a more detailed knowledge of the issue being negotiated, he should be at the legislator’s side during the negotiations...

...These people still owe a debt to their country...

...Working for Clinton...

...Encouraging investment is one example...

...These jobs often promised large amounts of time for schmoozing and a low premium on productivity and the bottom line...

...The example Waldman cites is that a few years ago a lobbying firm convinced businessmen that legislation they feared on indoor pollution was near passage...

...Nationally, 5 to 20 percent of teachers get such ratings...

...Interestingly enough, the zenith of the Peace Corps came in the mid-sixties, when it attracted 16,000 volunteers...

...The Post got it wrong...

...The former are called “Center Back,” the latter, “Overlapping Back...

...Every definition of caucus I have seen involves the word “meeting” or “conference...

...One problem with this class is that some of its most prized merit badges are morally dubious...

...But it does mean that blacks are not likely to quickly adjust to life in the business world...